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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049942">Haunted</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elldritch/pseuds/Elldritch'>Elldritch</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-typical emotional regulation, Eye Trauma, F/M, Starvation, Suicide, The Nine Houses really need better grief counsellors, This isn't how you do taxidermy, Waxing necrolagnic but make it really sad, very gross</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 06:41:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>980</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049942</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elldritch/pseuds/Elldritch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for this very excellent prompt (which did not deserve what I did with it):</p>
<p>Protesilaus Ebdoma is named for the greek hero Protesilaus of Phylace who was the first to die in the trojan war. Dulcie calls his wife Mia, which is almost certainly short for Laodamia after the classical Protesilaus' wife. This has poor implications for her prospects - Laodamia of Phylace did not handle her husband's death well.</p>
<p>As Protesilaus and Laodamia were newlyweds, his spirit was allowed to return to her for three hours before leaving for the underworld. Afterwards, she was so wracked by grief that she created his likeness in bronze and devoted herself to it as though it were her real husband. Her father eventually attempted to destroy the statue but she threw herself on the pyre and perished in the flames. This is all extremely fucking seventh.</p>
<p>Poor Mia is about to receive news of Pro's death alongside his perfectly preserved head which is honestly quite a bit better than a bronze statue. Grave lust is the classical vice in the nine houses, who could blame her for indulging a bit.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Protesilaus Ebdoma/Laodamia (Mia)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>TLT Kink Meme</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Haunted</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Laodamia – Mia, to her friends – knew that her husband was dead long before they brought her his remains. For three hours, the night that Protesilaus and Dulcinea left Rhodes for the First, her home had been overtaken by a restless ghost; the roses on the trellis around the door dropped their petals all at once; her tapestries unravelled; the flimsy where he'd written his love poems to her all burned. The whole house quivered in orgiastic, frenzied grief.</p>
<p>At the end of three hours, the air was quiet, and Mia surveyed the damage. She opened the door to find that the fallen rose petals formed a silhouette that was heartbreakingly familiar, a perfect copy of the chroma over the mantle depicting the two of them kissing on their wedding day.</p>
<p>The walls were bedecked with her tapestries, and each one was now marred by broad strokes of blankness. <em>LAODAMIA</em>, they shrieked silently at her, warp and weft showing indecently through, her name spelled out in emptiness.</p>
<p>In the bureau where he'd kept his poems she found drawer after drawer of ash, only tiny scraps of flimsy remaining. She pulled a few of these scraps from the ruin and looked at them. <em>Love. Love. Love!</em> Love was the only word which remained. She winnowed through the char until she held in her hands each piece, and she counted them. Eight-hundred-and-seventy-two. A love which had once been infinite, now quantified.</p>
<p>She waited for news, but there was none. Days became a week, and she could stand it no longer. She knew that he was gone, so where was the missive to permit her grief? The words on paper – for it would be paper, for this. Everyone knew what it meant when the Cohort courier came to your door with words on paper, sealed in wax. It was always tastefully done; black ink, white paper, red wax, all perfectly coordinated with the uniform of the officer who brought the news. The old joke: <em>what's black and white and red all over?</em></p>
<p>She sent the children away to school, and when the news finally came, she did not call them home. She stared at the paper, waiting for it to char, waiting for her grief to combust it, but his spirit was gone, and this letter held no words of love, only loss. She burned it herself.</p>
<p>His body was gone; they had returned only his head to her. Though she knew that he had been dead for months, he looked fresher; lips still barely parted, as if he had only just breathed his last. He was perfectly preserved.</p>
<p>She did not eat, and could not sleep. She pressed her lips to his and they were as soft and supple as they had been in life, and this enraged her. She had lost <em>everything!</em> Her house fell into disrepair around her as she could not bring herself to care for it. Her body, too, withered and sagged, hollowed out by grief. Everything here would waste away until only the head remained, whole and inviolate and remote. She had not died with him, and now he would not rot with her. It was this, this last betrayal, which broke her.</p>
<p>So she ignored the purity of his flesh, and worked to preserve it in her own way. She dug fingers into the wound at his neck and pulled out the meat of him until fingernails scraped against skull, and then she stuffed the cavity. She had none of the wadding the taxidermists used; instead she stalked the hallways of her decaying house, gathering each sad heap of embroidery thread in her arms. They had lain untouched since they'd wriggled free of of her tapestries, and when she'd collected it all, she found she had just enough to fill the void where her lover's mind had once been.</p>
<p>The eyes burst when she pulled them loose and the gore of them was still wet on her fingers as she plucked bruised and rotting petals from the ground outside her door. She rolled them between her palms until the whole house smelled sickly, grave-sweet. She pressed the resulting mess into his empty sockets and sealed his eyelids over them.</p>
<p>She tore out his tongue. With her finest thread, and a master's stitches, barely large enough to see, she pieced together eight-hundred-and-seventy-two scraps of flimsy, placing them in his mouth before she wired the jaw shut.</p>
<p>And then she lay with him in their bed and cried, and screamed, and clawed at herself. She rubbed his skin with the muck of her, curing it into a kind of leather with tears and blood, piss and sweat. When her work was done, she kissed him and finally tasted the rot and ruin she craved. She sighed; the strength of madness leaving her. She was weak now. Too weak to do anything but lie beside the head she'd desecrated with her devotion and wait for the waters of the River to well up and carry her down to where she knew his spirit waited.</p>
<p>They found her too late to save her, and though there was no trace of her spirit, or his, everyone who crossed the threshold agreed that the house was haunted. The whole farm was burned, and the charred land abandoned. The very fabric of Rhodes itself would bear the scar for generations to come.</p>
<p>Everyone had looked at them and seen a perfect specimen of courtly Seventh House love; they had seen the roses, and missed the thorns. Even Dulcie, who rejected their House's sentimentality with each fibre of her being was still too steeped in it to see how their roots twisted and clung, down in the darkness of the soil. Rapier and needle, thread and chain, Laodamia's was a love which pierced, a love which bound. Ultimately, it was a love which destroyed her.</p>
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